It was only in the 1960s that American horror cinema was mature enough to show the first traces of blood on screen, demonstrating how realism in cinema is constructed rather than a given.
Blood is inextricably linked to horror cinema, even if gore can show up in many other film genres, including western or gangster films. But it is horror, arguably, the film genre that most experiments with blood and how it is presented before the camera and audiences. This experimentation is related to forms of realism and, in turn, how realism has been constructed in cinema.
This essay proposes a look at blood in cinema during the 1960s, a decade that was pivotal in how gore was realistically portrayed on screen. In our current climate, blood on screen does not achieve the same critical reactions of repugnance and fear its depiction caused decades ago, to the point that audiences have forgotten that showing blood on screen is a recent phenomenon. It was in the 1960s that American horror cinema was mature enough to show the first traces of blood on screen, waiting for viewers’ reactions, before going to the savage decade of the 1970s.
In this sense, it is interesting how blood is “realistically” constructed in these first horror films that dared to show it. Rather than deep crimson and liquid, the first showings of blood depicted orange-like hues with a thickness closer to gouache than to real blood. Seen today, that blood may cause astonishment and even laughter, but it represented not only the first attempts at gore in American horror cinema but also a finished demonstration that realism in cinema is constructed rather than a given. This essay will begin with a brief overview of the history of horror films and their relationship with blood. Then, in a second section, it will analyze the construction of blood in the 1960s.
Horror Cinema and Blood: From Inception to the 1960s
The classic horror cycle began with Dracula (Tod Browning, 1931) and James Whale’s Frankenstein (1932), both from Universal Studios. Soon, other studios, such as RKO or Fox, jumped to the horror genre, which quickly gained popularity through the 1930s. Blood was mostly absent in these films, but some early examples depicted some small gore on the screen. Murders in the Zoo (A. Edward Sutherland) dared to show blood on screen in 1933 with a character’s lips sewn together, a close-up of his face showing blood trickling down his chin.
Horror cinema in the 1960s attempted not just to depict the first glimpses of blood and taboo right up to that moment; it also checked out how much Hollywood could show. In this sense, it is no coincidence that the first on-screen displays of blood possessed distancing qualities. Blood was, for the first time, exhibited in all its glory but “estranged,” made more a product of technicolor than the real thing.
Soon, however, the Production Code (or “Hays Code”) will take Hollywood cinema, “limiting how certain subjects and images could be portrayed. In turn, most film producers were unwilling to risk presenting controversial subjects” (Davis 279), including the depiction of blood. This led to naturalized but no less bizarre situations, such as seeing the feral werewolf played by Lon Chaney Jr. (The Wolf Man, George Waggner, 1941) strangling his victims rather than tearing them apart, the latter more logical for a savage beast. But strangulation (to which other monsters such as the mummy or Frankenstein’s creature would also resort) avoided the display of blood on screen.The classic cycle, exhausted, slowed down in the last years of the 1940s, with classic monsters such as Frankenstein’s creature, the wolf man, and Dracula being ridiculed and parodied in Abbot and Costello’s films. The horror cycle was replaced by B science fiction films, albeit these films were mixed with the horror genre with the uncanny presence of Big Eyed Monsters.
The 1950s were witness to deep changes in the American screen, including making films for a new cultural population: teenagers. “Although big-budget science fiction films such as The Day the Earth Stood Still were marketed to adults, low-budget films were aggressively marketed to teenagers and drive-in movie theaters. More science fiction films were shown in drive-in theaters than any other genre. Independent filmmakers like Roger Corman identified teens as the primary audience, releasing science fiction films as double features” (Lev 173). Thus, and with this new audience in mind for genre cinema, blood was severely censored.
It is important to note, however, that while blood was absent in American horror cinema, other countries shocked audiences with the full display of body parts and blood in technicolor, as the British Studios Hammer Films made with their first color horror productions such as The Curse of Frankenstein (Terence Fisher, 1957) or Dracula (Fisher, 1958). Key for Hammer’s success was the depiction of gore “using vivid hues that intensified the scares” (Weismann 67).
American horror, on the other hand, was doubly trapped: first, because horror cinema was mostly dead by the 1950s, now replaced, as mentioned previously, by science fiction. Second, the Production Code pushed creators to self-censorship, avoiding, among other things, the use of blood on screen.
By the 1960s, however, the Production Code was becoming rapidly irrelevant (Monaco 62). This irrelevance granted more space for authors to voice their ideas, including, at least, the depiction of blood on screen. Yet, this transition from being invisible to being displayed in technicolor had first to be tested through the measures of film realism.
Technicolor Blood
American cinema was (and still is) based on realism and verisimilitude. The development of realism was carefully made following narrative unity (the chain of cause and effect) and the ‘invisible’ or ‘transparent’ representational regime, meaning, and the presentation would reveal as little as possible of the medium’s technique through editing. In other words, “the screen might be likened to a plate-glass window through which the observer looks with one eye at the actual scene” (Bordwell, Thompson and Staiger 70). Other devices to enhance verisimilitude were psychological motivation and the chain of cause and effect.
Horror cinema in the 1960s attempted not just to depict the first glimpses of blood and taboo right up to that moment; it also checked out how much Hollywood could show. In this sense, it is no coincidence that the first on-screen displays of blood possessed distancing qualities. Blood was, for the first time, exhibited in all its glory but “estranged,” made more a product of technicolor than the real thing.
The famous Roger Corman/Edgar Allan Poe cycle, which included classics such as The Fall of the House of Usher (Roger Corman, 1960) or Pit and the Pendulum (Corman, 1961), was especially important in showing the first glimpses of blood in the 1960s, as the cycle was, basically, the only source of unaltered horror in the first half of the decade. Blood was exhibited (not in profusion, alas) but with two peculiarities.
First, there was the color. The hues were closer to orange than the crimson of real blood. This is not to say that blood in the cycle Poe/Corman was precisely orange, but the shade or hue used was, rather than crimson, either vermillion or red-orange. Corman’s The Tomb of Ligeia (1964) is an excellent case study, as the spilled blood spreads over white. A dead fox spills red-orange blood on pristine white flowers, the gore’s hue clearly visible. In the film’s climax, Lady Rowena (Elizabeth Shepperd), now possessed by defunct Ligeia, dies, her body falling to the floor. She leaves a trace of blood on her husband’s (Vincent Price) white shirt. The blood is clearly red-orange.
Even more orange-like and brighter is the blood offered by the last film in the cycle, Gordon Hessler’s The Oblong Box(1969). In the film, Sir Julian Markham (Vincent Price) is an aristocrat of the late 19th century who keeps his disturbed and disfigured brother Edward locked up in a tower of his manor. Edward manages to escape and seeks revenge against Julian for the years of imprisonment. The film opens with a flashback, where Edward is savagely beaten by natives in Africa when blamed for the accidental killing of a child. In some scenes, the blood spilled is closer to red: for example, a goat is killed, and its blood is closer to red than orange.
Yet, there is the second point producing estrangement in viewers: its thickness. The blood, as exhibited in the film, is heavy and does not drip but rather remains covering the bodies. It is too thick to drip properly. In a flashback, an African aborigine moves his blood-covered spear up and down; the blood, however, remains still, too thick to drip. When the flashback ends, the opening credits begin. They take place over a painting showing, among other things, blood. The color of the blood in the painting is exactly the same shade as the “real” blood used in the flashback, thus demonstrating that the blood on screen is, in essence, a cultural artifact.
The highly fake blood was not limited only to the Poe/Corman cycle; other films of the decade also naturalized its use. Twice-Told Tales (Sidney Salkow, 1963), a period piece that uses Price and technicolor to imitate Corman’s cycle, used this type of blood as well. The film, a portmanteau of three short stories, displays some gore in the last tale, with Price playing a cruel husband. Haunted by ghosts of the past, paintings hanging on the wall and the walls themselves start to spill blood in the story’s climax. The gore is clearly orange in color and thick like tempera.
This does not mean that audiences in the 1960s were unaware of what real blood looked like, but it refers to how realism was conceived. In the excellent study Family Values: Subjects Between Nature and Culture (2018), Kelly Oliver argues that the invisible, what lies within the human body, was imagined, and sometimes, even real proofs about how an internal organ looked in reality was not enough to stop medicine from drawing it in a wrong way (12). “What the scientist ‘sees’ is affected by what he expects to see” (Oliver 14).
Then, reality is culturally constructed rather than being just naïvely observable via perceptions. Blood was constructed to look like blood yet not entirely like blood since gore on screen was still a novelty, something to test. The real, in art, is not just represented following a naïve ideal of mimesis but transformed to being something identifiable to general audiences and naturalized — in cognitive, ethical, or aesthetic ways — in storytelling. Art and our daily perceptions as well, are cultural constructions complexly mediated by formalist assumptions.
Only a few years later, red blood will be all too present in the 1970s, with the coming of Herschell Gordon Lewis, the “godfather” of gore, and with new films that pushed the envelope like Tobe Hooper’s The Texas Chain Saw Massacre(1974). As in the previous cylcle, the flow of gore was recreated on the screen because blood, like all real things in society, is only a cultural production of a discursive nature.
Bibliography
Bordwell, David, Janet Staiger and Kristin Thompson. The Classical Hollywood Cinema. Film Style & Mode of Production to 1960. London: Routledge, 2005.
Davis, Blair. “Of Apes and Men (and Monsters and Girls): The Ape Film and 1940s Horror Cinema.” In Recovering 1940s Horror Cinema: Traces of a Lost Decade, edited by Charlie Ellbé, Kristopher Woofter and Mario DeGiglio-Bellemare, 275-294. Lanham: Lexington, 2015.
Lev, Peter. Transforming the Screen, 1950-1959. New York: Thomson Gale, 2003.
Monaco, Paul. The Sixties: 1960-1969. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003.
Oliver, Kelly. Family Values: Subjects Between Nature and Culture. New York: Routledge, 1997.
Weismann, Brad. Horror Unmasked: A History of Terror from Nosferatu to Nope. New York: Quarto Publishing, 2023.
